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In Agatha Christie’s novels, the closest Hercule Poirot comes to expressing any religious feeling is to mutter “Mon Dieu” whenever Captain Hastings says something especially asinine. But in Sarah Phelps’s BBC One adaptation of The ABC Murders, we have a pious Poirot (John Malkovich) regularly down on his knees praying – and not just in gratitude that Phelps decided to leave the irritating Hastings out of her screenplay.

In the books the serene, self-assured Poirot never seems to be touched by any of the extremes of passion or suffering he so ably diagnoses in others; but there was never any likelihood he would stay that way in one of Phelps’s angsty scripts. So the real jaw-dropping revelation...